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Author Archives: Scott Morrison

Readers may recall that during the 2013 “peak-Elsevier” period, Elsevier made an interesting concession to the mathematical community — they released all their old mathematical content (“old” here means a rolling 4-year embargo) under a fairly permissive licence.

Unfortunately, sometime in the intervening period they have quietly withdrawn some of the rights they gave to that content. In particular, they no longer give the right to redistribute on non-commercial terms. Of course, the 2013 licence is no longer available on their website, but thankfully David Roberts saved a copy at https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DavidRoberts/posts/asYgXTq9Y2r. The critical sentence there is

“Users may access, download, copy, translate, text and data mine (but may not redistribute, display or adapt) the articles for non-commercial purposes provided that users: …”

I think this is pretty upsetting. The big publishers hold the copyright on our collective cultural heritage, and they can deny us access to the mathematical literature at a whim. The promise that we could redistribute on a non-commercial basis was a guarantee that we could preserve the literature. If this is to be taken away, I hope that mathematicians will go to war again.

Hopefully Elsevier will soon come out with a “oops, this was a mistake, those lawyers, you know?” but this will only happen if we get on their case.

What to do:

Elsevier journal editors: please contact your Elsevier representations, and ask that the licence for the open archives be restored to what it was, to assure the mathematical community that we have ongoing access to the old literature.

Elsevier referees and authors: please contact your journal editors, to ask them to contact Elsevier. If you are currently refereeing or submitting, please bring up this issue directly.

Happily, as we have a copy of the 2013 licence, all the Elsevier open mathematics archive up to 2009 is still available for non-commercial redistribution under their terms. You can find these at https://tqft.net/misc/elsevier-oa/.

It is far from clear to me that Springer’s copyright agreement (quoted below) is compatible with posting your paper on the arXiv under the CC-BY license. Happily, a Springer representative has just confirmed for me that this is allowed:

Let me first say that the cc-by-0 license is no problem at all as it allows for other publications without restrictions. Second, our copyright statement of course only talks about the version published in one of our journals, with our copyright line (or the copyright line of a partner society if applicable, or the author’s copyright if Open Access is chosen) on it.

At least if you are publishing in a Springer journal, and more generally, I would strongly encourage you to post your papers to the arXiv under the more permissive CC-BY-0 license, rather than the minimal license the arXiv requires.

As a question to any legally-minded readers: does copyright law genuinely distinguish between “the version published in one of our journals, with our copyright line”, and the “author-formatted post-peer-review” version which is substantially identical, barring the journals formatting and copyright line?

The Mathematical Sciences Institute at the Australian National University is seeking to invigorate its research and teaching profile in the areas of statistics, probability, stochastic analysis, mathematical finance and/or biomathematics/biostatistics. We wish to fill several continuing positions at the Academic Level B and/or Level C (which equates to the position of Associate Professor within the United States of America). Up to 3 full time positions may be awarded.

You will be joining an internationally recognised leading team of academics with a focus on achieving excellence in research and teaching. The Institute comprises of approximately fifty academics, within seven mathematical research programs. Applicants are expected to have an outstanding record in research, teaching and administration. All positions will involve some teaching, in the specialised areas advertised and/or standard mathematics undergraduate courses, but this may be at a reduced level for several years.

It’s a great place to work, excellent opportunities for research grant funding, and a really nice place to live. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the job or living in Canberra.

Update — there are now not one, but two, positions available! The application has been extended to the end of November.

We’ve just put up an ad for a new 2 year postdoctoral position at the ANU, to work with myself and Tony Licata. We’re looking for someone who’s interested in operator algebras, quantum topology, and/or representation theory, to collaborate with us on Australian Research Council funded projects.

The ad hasn’t yet been crossposted to MathJobs, but hopefully it will eventually appear there! In any case, applications need to be made through the ANU website. You need to submit a CV, 3 references, and a document addressing the selection criteria. Let me know if you have any questions about the application process, the job, or Canberra!

Amnon Neeman has just put up an ad for two postdoctoral positions at the ANU. He says: “The successful applicants should have strong research interests and activities in or related to one of the following fields: Algebraic Geometry, Commutative Algebra, Representation Theory, Algebraic Topology, Algebraic K-Theory. Skills at applying the techniques of triangulated categories to these areas would be a plus.”

These are excellent positions — available for up to 3 years, with no teaching requirements, and salaries in the AUD81-89k range.

Applications close at the end of January, and I hear Amnon is keen to hire as soon as possible.

We the undersigned announce that, as of today 15 September 2014, we’re starting an indefinite strike. We will decline all papers submitted to us at the Journal of K-Theory.

Our demand is that, as promised in 2007-08, Bak’s family company (ISOPP) hand over the ownership of the journal to the K-Theory Foundation (KTF). The handover must be unconditional, free of charge and cover all the back issues.

I’ve just got back from talking to Roxanne Missingham, the University Librarian here at ANU, about Elsevier, and I want to quickly report on what I learnt.

I don’t yet have any of the juicy numbers revealing what libraries are paying for their Elsevier subscriptions (as Timothy Gowers has been doing in the UK; if you haven’t read his post do that first!). Nevertheless there are some interesting details.

Essentially all the Australian universities, excepting a few tiny private institutes, subscribe to the Freedom collection (this is the same bundle that nearly everyone is forced into subscribing to). The contracts are negotiated by CAUL (the Council of Australian University Librarians).

My librarian was very frank about Article Processing Charges (APCs) constituting double-dipping, whatever it is that Elsevier and the other publishers say. The pricing of journal bundles is so opaque, and to the extent we understand it primarily based on the historical contingencies of print subscription levels more than a decade ago, that in practice the fraction of articles in a subscription bundle for which APCs have been paid has no meaningful effect on the prices libraries pay for their bundles.

I think this point needs wider dissemination amongst mathematicians — whatever our complaints about APCs inhibiting access to journals for mathematicians without substantial funding, we are just plain and simple being ripped off. Gold open access hybrid journals are a scam.

Now, on to some details about contracts. First, my librarian confirmed the impression from Gowers’ investigations in the UK — bundle pricing is based largely on historical spending on print subscriptions, with annual price increases. Adding some interesting context on the numbers we’re now seeing out of the UK, she told me that the UK is widely perceived as having received a (relatively) great deal from Elsevier, in terms of annual price increases. If the UK numbers scared you, be aware that here in Australia we may well have it worse. A curious anecdote about historical pricing of subscriptions is that one division of CSIRO happened to have cancelled most of their print journals the year before they took out an electronic subscription with a commercial publisher, and as a result got an excellent deal. The Australian universities have apparently mostly signed confidentiality agreements regarding their journal subscription costs (as we expect, by now), but my understanding of the conversation was that the ANU in particular had not.

Finally, my librarian pointed out that doing what I hope to do next, namely use the FOI act to obtain detailed information on Elsevier subscription costs, may be counterproductive, as the most likely result of unusual discrepancies in pricing being revealed is some libraries simply having budgets cut, rather than actually giving the negotiators any more power in the future. I got the impression she’d talked to other Australian librarians about this, and there was some amount of nervousness.

I’ve been told I should go talk to Andrew Wells, the librarian at UNSW, and after posting this I’m going to get in touch with him!

(This post may only be of interest to Australian mathematicians; sorry!)

Summary: A number of mathematics journals (e.g. Quantum Topology, Forum of Mathematics Sigma and Pi, and probably many others), are not listed on the new official journal list in Australia. Please, help identify missing journals, and submit feedback via http://jacci.arc.gov.au/.

Every few years the Australian Research Council updates their “official list of journals”. One might wonder why it’s necessary to have such a list, but nevertheless it is there, and it is important that it is accurate because the research outputs of Australian mathematicians are essentially filtered by this list for various purposes.

There is a new draft list out, and the purpose of this post is to coordinate finding missing journals, and to ensure that interested mathematicians submit feedback before the deadline of March 15. Please note that while in the past this list included dubious rankings of journals, the current list is just meant to track all peer reviewed journals in each subject. Having a journal missing entirely means that some published papers will not be counted in measures of a department’s or university’s research output.

Please look through the lists. If you see something missing, please comment here so we all know about it. In any case, please submit feedback via http://jacci.arc.gov.au/ (you’ll have to create an account first) recommending inclusion of the journals identified so far. Submitting a missing journal requires identifying an article published in it by an Australia author; feel free to add this information here as well if appropriate. (Thanks to Anthony Henderson for pointing out this detail!)

It is also possible to submit additional “FoR” (field of research) codes for journals on the list, and this may be of interest to people publishing cross-disciplinary research. Feel free to make suggestions along these line here too: the AustMS has been advised that “multiple responses, rather than a single AustMS one, will carry more weight on this aspect”.

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Secret Blogging Seminar

A group blog by 8 recent Berkeley mathematics Ph.D.'s. Commentary on our own research, other mathematics pursuits, and whatever else we feel like writing about on any given day. Sort of like a seminar, but with (even) more rude commentary from the audience.